I had a lot of fun this summer doing research here and am glad to say that I will be continuing to work on the same project for the upcoming semester. I still have a lot of data to collect and many more qPCR reactions to run, but I’m glad to see how much progress I’ve made over the summer. It has put me in a good position to finish collecting the data and finish up my analysis hopefully by the end of the fall semester so that I can move on to a new project in the spring.

In my last post I mentioned that I was going to attempt to use a new method to analyze all of the data I’ve been collecting this summer. I had been using a method from a paper that my professor recommended, but that method wasn’t working out as well as we had hoped. I constructed standard curves for all of the yeast chromosomes which allowed me to figure out the starting concentration of DNA (depending on the output of a quantitative PCR reaction).

So far this summer I’ve really been enjoying the work that I’m doing in the lab and I’m excited to say that I’m finally starting to get some good results. The first couple weeks of research were slow going as I attempted to figure out how to optimize my experiment. A lot of what I do revolves around extracting DNA, diluting it to the right concentration, and replicating this DNA to try to figure out relative frequencies of different chromosomes. I had to spend quite a bit of time figuring out the optimal concentrations of DNA and primers as well as optimal temperatures to perform some of the steps required to replicate the DNA. I had to get the reaction to work perfectly before I was able to start testing specific chromosomes of strains that I thought might be out of balance.

My name is Zach Oppler and I’m a rising junior here at William and Mary. I’m a CAMS (biology track) and Psychology double major and I’m from Potomac, Maryland. This semester I worked in Dr. Murphy’s evolutionary genetics lab and that’s where I’ll be working this summer as well.